Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have made good on a promise they made last November that they would combine their technologies to build a high-powered computer processor chip to challenge those offered by Nvidia Corp.

The longtime rivals unveiled a new series of laptop chips Sunday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that combine Intel’s latest core processor technology with AMD’s Radeon graphics.

The new 8th Gen Intel Core processor with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics chips are part of Intel’s H-series line, which are the most powerful laptop processors it offers. The chips are designed to power some of the highest-end gaming and professional laptops that will be shipped this year.

Last year’s announcement that Intel and AMD were cooperating took the industry by surprise somewhat, considering the long rivalry between the two companies. But with Nvidia stealing a march with its graphics processing unit chips, the two firms clearly decided the benefits outweighed competitive concerns.

The collaboration was made possible chiefly because Intel lacks a GPU that performs as well as AMD’s Radeon RX Vega, while AMD has struggled to compete with Intel’s central processing units. The obvious solution was to team up and build a new kind of chip that incorporates the best from both companies.

The new chip combines Intel’s 8th Gen Intel Core CPU with a custom-designed AMD Radeon integrated GPU. The chip also comes with a 50 percent smaller silicon footprint than earlier designs, which means laptops that incorporate them will be able to sport a much slimmer and more portable form factor.

The chips also use something called an Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge, which allows for faster communications between the CPU, GPU and dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory. Intel calls the EMIB the heart of the chip unit design, and the company says that it eliminates height impact and greatly reduces manufacturing and design complexities.

This video goes into more detail on how EMIB works:

Each unit also comes with 4 gigabytes of HMB2 VRAM, which Intel said should help save space internally within laptops, while also providing a boost to battery life. Intel claimed that gamers should notice a two to three times performance boost over a three-year-old system with an Intel Core i7 chip and an Nvidia GTX 950M GPU.

The collaboration is designed to help Intel and AMD compete with their biggest rival in the world of high-end laptops, which is Nvidia. That company has dominated the mobile discrete graphics chip market for years, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

“This is a great product that allows Intel and AMD to make a real attempt to compete with Nvidia at the high end,” Moorhead wrote in his Forbes blog. “I believe that we will probably see a response from Nvidia, but it will be difficult for Nvidia to accomplish the size reductions and efficiency of having everything in one chip like Intel has successfully accomplished.”

Moorhead added that the new Intel + Radeon chips also pack enough punch to meet the performance requirements of virtual reality headsets such as Facebook Inc.-owned Oculus Rift and Microsoft Corp.’s Mixed Reality system. It’s a development that could give virtual reality in general a very big boost, because it allows for much “sleeker and slimmer” form factors than before, Moorhead said.

Intel’s and AMD’s partners haven’t yet announced any new laptops incorporating the new chips, but a number of new products likely will be unveiled throughout the week at CES.

Image: Intel/AMD